It’s … The Encyclopedia of American loons! Our new and exciting series presenting a representative sample of American loons from A-Z.

Thursday, January 2, 2014

#854: Beverly LaHaye

Beverly LaHaye is the founder of Concerned Women for America,
and a rabidly insane author of books (several of them with Terri Blackstock)
attacking gay rights and the feminist movement – according to Lahaye “[f]eminism is more than an illness. It is a philosophy of death.”. She is, for
instance, a vocal critic of the Committee for Eliminating Discrimination Against Women,
since she believes the committee is heading a super-secred conspiracy to pass
the Equal Rights Amendment and give equal rights to gay people, which I am not
sure would count as a secret conspiracy even if it were true. LaHaye was as
such in the vanguard in the (successful) fight against US ratification of the
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women,
making the point that ratifying the convention would mean that a “twisted
ideology of extremist feminism rebelling against God and His law” would allow
communist China and North Korea to dominate American society and that communists would raise your children.
Furthermore, the convention is not sufficiently Biblical, and what women really
need is more Jesus.

Her organization, Concerned Women for America (CWA), is a
wingnut extremist organization opposed to anything that smacks of sympathy
with, well, anyone, really. Especially homosexuals, but also in general members
of what they deem to be our “sex-saturated culture.” Their mission statement is
“to protect and promote Biblical values among all citizens – first through
prayer, then education, and finally by influencing our society – thereby
reversing the decline in moral values in our nation,” where “moral values” of
course means anything the organization’s members don’t fancy because they are
hateful bigots, regardless of whether it has anything to do with morality or
not. And since their fight against contraception, say, won’t fly particularly
well, they have also taken the fights to third-world countries where success is
more likely (also here).

The CWA is explicitly opposed to freedom of choice, Muslims,
non-Americans and non-Christians,
and more or less anything having to do with women’s rights,
including equal pay, birth control, abortion, maternity leave (well – real
women would of course leave the workforce for good, regardless of pregnancy)
and Obamacare with its "super-death-panels",
as well as anything that resembles pornography or gambling.
They donated $409,000 in support of Proposition 8, which would ban same-sex
marriage in California, and opposed the 1988 Act for Better Child Care, which
would have provided government-sponsored child care for families in which both
parents are working, since that would not, apparently, support a Biblical
design of families. As for hate crimes, CWA apparently thinks that the very
existence of hate crimes against gays and lesbians is doubtful and that false
reports of ha hate crimes have been used to push legislation supporting the
same-sex agenda (the conspiracy is apparently everywhere).
Similarly with anti-bullying efforts – according to the CWA “the radical
homosexual lobby has done a masterful job of infiltrating our government
schools to gain control of the minds of America’s youth. Their propaganda
tactics are time-tested. With liberal school officials in tow, they brazenly
circumvent and abuse parental authority to use good-hearted but misguided
children as pawns to further their deceptive agenda,” repeating the claims that
homosexuals do not suffer from a history of discrimination, that reports of
bias crimes against LGBT people are typically fabricated, and that such
protections against discrimination would violate the religious liberties of
Christians (i.e. restrict Christians’ (the CWA’s) right to violate the
religious liberties of others). LaHaye has repeatedly called for more God in politics,
and the group’s understanding of “freedom” is predictably Orwellian.

In fact, according to themselves, the CWA is not opposed to
feminism at all. Indeed, they are taking it back. According to senior fellow
and director of the Beverly LaHaye Institute Janice Crouse, feminism was
initially a Christian movement until it “was taken over by lesbians” (she didn’t back the claim up with evidence). Real feminism, you see, is
serving your husband and fulfill your God-ordained role as his servant.

The CWA has furthermore claimed that publicly funded HIV
screening and publicly funded STD treatment are objectionable programs,
apparently since such programs may save the life or happiness of people who
live in sin and deserve to die. They also describe embryonic stem cell research
as “deadly” but display no sign of comprehension of what stem cell research is.

Another one of their favorite issues is pushing religion and
pseudoscience in public schools, including school prayer and Intelligent Design (because “courses only teaching evolution fail to give students a well-rounded
view of the universe's creation,” which happened in accordance with the Bible).
As for sex education their position is of course “abstinence only” (apparently
other forms of sex education just “furthers the homosexual agenda”).
The fact that it has been repeatedly shown that abstinence only programs are
ineffective is dismissed as a liberal, economically motivated conspiracy.

- Penny Young Nance,
the group’s CEO and president, and a notoriously unsympathetic person who e.g.
claimed that if Sandra Fluke spent less money on beer she would be able to
afford her own birth control,
which is a rather irrelevant point but apparently a pretty accurate display of
Nance’s personality.

Diagnosis: A thoroughly repugnant person, LaHaye and her
Taliban satellite group have actually managed to cause quite a bit of pain and
damage during their existence, and they remain frighteningly influential. A
serious threat to liberty, reason, freedom, and happiness.